Growing Your Reach

When you’re building a list, growing your audience, or looking for clients, it’s quality, not quantity that matters. It’s better to have a small, responsive group of people that are more likely to become buyers, then a large group of unresponsive people who are mainly freebie seekers. There are several ways of growing your reach so you can find quality leads that you can turn into clients. I’ll show you a few of them in this article.

1) You can expand your reach in social media best by partnering with influencers. Influencers are people who have large or medium size lists or audiences that are responsive to their offers and contain your target market. You can find influencers in your industry by Googling your topic and seeing which websites come up on the first pages. Those are most likely to be the big influencers. Then contact them and see how you can be of service to them. Wait, you say, how is that going to help me? It will help you to give first. Influencers don’t need you—you need them. So you need to go out of your way to give them whatever support you can. That could be something like promoting their product launches, commenting on their blog posts, mentioning them in your blog posts, etc.

2) You can also look on Amazon in your topic under books and see what the most popular books are on your topic, because those authors may also be influencers. You can follow the same procedures as above, including book launches.

3) Another way to expand your reach is to proactively participate in the groups that you belong to, by commenting on discussions, asking questions, and engaging people in conversations. And of course that all should lead to setting up private conversations with qualified leads.

I recommend that you pick one social media platform and focus on it. Mastering one marketing strategy will put you farther ahead, faster, than trying to keep up with many strategies on the different social media networks.

Tips
There are many ways to use social media to get clients. Here are some tips:

Just start with one social media site and work with it until you start getting consistent results.

Know which site to use: Pick the social media site where the most of your target market hangs out.

If they are mostly on LinkedIn, look for groups on LinkedIn that you can join and start participating in the discussions.

If they are mostly on Facebook, find groups on Facebook that you can join and start participating in the discussions.

Be selective about who you connect with on social media—it should mainly be quality leads.

Always, always have a plan for following up with people you connect with on social media.

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit-Hole
There are several different ways that you can avoid wasting time on social media and stay focused on the above business tasks. First of all, you want to plan out a strategy and then you want to follow it! That means that you need to have a formal, written-out plan. A second strategy for not wasting time on social media is to give yourself a time limit when you’re on there. Start with 15-30 minutes a day and see how efficient you can be. Set a timer.